1733, first following Hobbes and Locke in his definition of wit, and then going on: Now, the Age, in which Shakespeare liv'd, having, above all others, a wonderful Affection to appear Learned, They declined vulgar Images, such as are immediately fetch'd from Nature, and rang'd thro' the Circle of the Sciences to fetch their Ideas from thence. But as the Resemblances of such Ideas to the Subject must necessarily lie very much out of the common Way, and every Piece of Wit appear a Riddle to the Vulgar; This, that should have taught them the forced, quaint, unnatural Tract they were in, (and induce them to follow a more natural One,) was the very Thing that kept them attach'd to it. The ostentatious Affectation of abstruse Learning, peculiar to that time, the Love that Men naturally have to every Thing that looks like Mystery, fixed them down to this Habit of Obscurity. Thus became the Poetry of DONNE (tho' the wittiest Man of that Age,) nothing but a continued Heap of Riddles. And our Shakespeare, with all his easy Nature about him, for want of Knowledge of the true Rules of Art, falls frequently into this vicious manner.72 David Hume, too, although never a very trustworthy critic, made a similar point in his essay on "Simplicity and Refinement in Writing" (1741-42), stressing the incompatibility of wit and passion, and the failure of witty writings to please after more than one reading. These were the reasons why he so soon tired of Martial and it was "sufficient to run over Cowley once. 1973 It was no wonder, then, that men of all types such as Leonard Welsted, Lord Lansdowne, and James Thompson-expressed contempt toward "wit," a term which they used loosely and vaguely to stigmatize a taste and a style which were not their own. To them and to most of their contemporaries the kind of wit used by the Metaphysicals was not permanent, but distracted the logical and uncomplex mind by its very brilliancy. The "Age of Pope," then, was adverse in its judgment on the Metaphysical poets, although the discrimination which such a rational period was naturally fair enough to exercise preserved certain elements and poems as still deserving of admiration. It remained for the Romantic Revival to recover and partially at least to rehabilitate the group by shifting the emphasis to other traits, which were perhaps just as typical as those of which the NeoClassicists so strongly disapproved." 72 Theobald, Shakespeare (London, 1733), I, xlvi-vii. 73 Hume, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political (London, 1870), pp. 115-16. 74 For the attitude of these men toward "wit," see Welsted, "Dissertation concerning the Perfection of the Engl. Lang., State of Poetry, &c.," in Durham, pp. 392-93; Lansdowne, Genuine Works in Verse and Prose (London, 1736), I, 89 ff.; Thomson, "Preface to Winter," Seasons (Berlin, 1908), pp. 240-41. 75 The present writer is preparing an article on "The Reputation of the 'Metaphysical Poets' during the Age of Johnson and the Romantic Revival.'' TWO ANCIENT PARALLELS TO AUCASSIN ET NICOLETTE, VI, 34-40 By ALEXANDER HAGGERTY KRAPPE University of Minnesota The passage of the sixth section of the Cantefable in which the hero states that he would prefer Hell to Paradise and gives his reasons, is one of the best known of the work. It reads as follows: ... Mais en infer voil jou aler; car en infer vont li bel clerc, et li bel cevalier qui sont mort as tornois et as rices gueres, et li boin sergant et li franc home. Aveuc čiax voil jou aler. Et s'i vont les beles dames cortoises, que eles ont deus amis ou trois avoc leur barons et s'i va li ors et li argens et li vairs et li gris, et si i vont harpeor et jogleor et li roi del siecle. . . .1 What is most remarkable in these lines is the fact that the devil appears to have been given the choice company of the upper classes of mediaeval society, la société courtoise, as opposed to the priests and monks, the saints of the Church. Such discrimination is typically mediaeval, for at no other period did there exist such a sharp dividing line between the Church and the World, the clergy and the laity. Still there is an ancient parallel to the enumeration in Aucassin et Nicolette; it is found in the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. Aeneas comes to the dim waters of the Styx, and along the dismal shore of the river of darkness he sees: 305 Huc omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat, Matres atque viri, defunctaque corpora vita Magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae, The corpora magnanimum heroum correspond very well to li bel cevalier qui sont mort as tornois et as rices gueres; the iuvenes are the boin sergant, and the innuptae puellae have become the beles dames cortoises.2 1 Aucassin et Nicolette, p. p. H. Suchier, trad. française, Paderborn, 1906, p. 8. 2 The same passage of the Aeneid seems to have influenced a verse of Dante, Inf. V, 71-3: Poscia ch'io ebbi il mio Dottore udito Nomar le donne antiche e i cavalieri, This similarity appears to have escaped the notice of Dante scholars, as I find The qualifying clause referring to les beles dames cortoises and which throws a peculiar light on certain aspects of cortois society, again has a parallel in antiquity. Seneca, in the third book of his treatise entitled De Beneficis, inveighs against certain abuses of contemporary Roman society, using the following words: Seneca, De Benef. III. 16. 3. Numquid iam ullus adulterii pudor est, postquam eo ventum est, ut nulla virum habeat, nisi ut adulterum inritet? argumentum est deformitatis pudicitia. Quam invenies tam miseram, tam sordidam, ut illi satis sit unum adulterorum par, nisi singulis divisit horas? et non sufficiet dies omnibus, nisi apud alium gestata est, apud alium mansit. infrunita et antiqua est, quae nesciat matrimonium vocari unum adulterium. Quemadmodum horum delictorum iam evanuit pudor, postquam res latius evagata est, ita ingratos plures efficies et avidiores, si numerare se coeperint. About the popularity of the Aeneid throughout the middle ages nothing need be said here. The facts are too well known since Comparetti's researches. The moralist Seneca was hardly less popular than Virgil. The legend of his correspondence with Saint Paul was widely current in the middle ages. His works were copied diligently, and the number of extant manuscripts of them is unusually great. It is not known whether the author of Aucassin et Nicolette was a jongleur or a man of certain culture, that is, a clerk. Probably he was both. If this view be adopted, there would be a strong probability that the coincidence of the passages quoted is not accidental. But in that case, why look for Oriental influences to explain the alternation of prose and verse? Would it then not be most likely that the poet had in mind the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius, one of the most popular works in the middle ages? no mention of it in E. Moore, Studies in Dante. First Series: Scripture and Classical Authors in Dante, Oxford, 1886. 3 M. Schanz, Geschichte d. röm. Lit., II, 2, 1901, p. 319; F. Leo, Die Römische Literatur d. Altertums, in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, Teil I, Abt. VIII: Die griechische und lateinische Literatur und Sprache, Berlin u. Leipzig, 1907, p. 376; A. Graf, Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginazioni del medio evo, Torino, 1882-3, II, 278 ff. 4 Suchier, op. cit., p. VI. 5 W. Hertz, Spielmannsbuch, Stuttgart u. Berlin, 1905, p. 437. BOOK REVIEWS Our Debt to Greece and Rome, edited by George Depue Hadzsits and David Moore Robinson: Seneca, Virgil, Horace, Greek Biology and Medicine, by Richard Mott Gummere, J. W. Mackail, Grant Showerman, Henry Osborn Taylor. Marshall Jones Co., Boston, 1922. What promises to be a notable series of fifty books has been auspiciously begun in the first four volumes under review. The appearance of the little volumes is unusually pleasing; cover, paper, type, wide margins, gold edges, all contribute to make books which are a pleasure to handle and to read. Gummere's Seneca the Philosopher and His Modern Message is well written and stimulating. The first two chapters, on Seneca's life and times, seem relatively too long, though they are interesting. The third chapter, dealing with the relation of Stoicism in general and Seneca in particular to Christianity might well have been given more space. The following chapters discuss Seneca's influence on the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and more recent centuries, notably on Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, and Montaigne. The author has succeeded in making this portion very readable, hard as it is in a brief sketch to avoid becoming cataloguish. Mackail's Virgil and His Meaning to the World of To-day is primarily a fine appreciation of Virgil by a writer whom we have long known as a sensitive critic and as a master of English style. Such an appreciation really defies review. At first sight the book seems scarcely to live up to the general title of the series, as only one short chapter deals with Virgil's influence on modern writers. To be sure, the Table of Contents contains such labels as this (for Chapter II): Virgil's World: Its Meaning for and Its Likeness to Our Own World, but only the first two words are justified. Yet after all there is a contribution in the little volume to the idea of the series. The two main chapters, short as they are, set forth two qualities of Virgil's poetry which are of permanent value. First is human sympathy. This does not take the form of gushing sentimentality. Virgil's style may be described paradoxically as a classic romanticism. The other quality which Mackail stresses is the idea of a world-state at peace. Virgil's paci imponere morem is a better slogan than "Law not War." One point of criticism: Mackail does not know or does not accept Jackson's convincing explanation of Horace's characterization of Virgil's Eclogues as molle atque facetum: Horace refers to the plain style of the Eclogues, not to their tenderness and grace.' Excellent as the above volumes are, Showerman's Horace and His Influence seems to be the most notable of the three and the most successful in meeting the needs of the series. About half of the book is devoted to a characteriza tion of Horace which at once makes an appeal to the lover of Horace because of its felicitous appropriateness. It is a veritable cento of Horatian expression, a gaily colored quilt in which almost all of Horace's happy phrases are used. Showerman rightly says that above all Horace is a person and proceeds to characterize that person. Horace is an interpreter of things Roman. He has a homely but universal philosophy of life. The second part of the book deals with Horace's influence from ancient to modern times. In the early Middle Ages, Horace was not popular, for, as Showerman aptly puts it: "The life of logic began to be displaced by the life of feeling"- and Horace is essentially intellectual, though by no means "high-brow." It is since the Renaissance that Horace has enjoyed his greatest popularity. He is the most modern of ancient writers, Greek or Roman. No author has been so frequently translated. But the most notable chapter is the third. Here is shown concretely the extent of Horace's influence in various ways, first upon the formation of the literary ideal of modern times, especially through the Ars Poetica, which ranks with Aristotle's Poetics as a moulder of literature and literary criticism in our modern European civilization. Secondly, Horace has influenced literary creation through his own example, whether in adaptations such as Thackeray's Dear Lucy and Kipling's Fifth Book of Horace (Eugene Field's Echoes from a Sabine Farm surely deserve mention here) or in freer creations such as Andrew Lang's letter to Horace. But Horace has also had his influence on the generality of men; he gives pleasure to the reader by his lighter poems (though Showerman is scarcely right in calling Soracte, Carpe Diem, Integer Vitae merely jeux-d'esprit"), he is the poet of friendship, of kindliness. Showerman points to the influence of such phrases as Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and recalls its use in modern Rome on the monument of those who fell at Dogali. He might better have recorded its presence on the gates of our own National Cemetery at Arlington. Above all, as Showerman says, Horace is the poet of sane living. Whoso reads him can be no zealot. "Poetic expression is more choice and many men appreciably saner and happier" because of Horace. Taylor's Greek Biology and Medicine deals chiefly with Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen. Hippocrates is given particular praise for methods of diagnosis and therapeutics based on practical experience rather than theory and for the development of medical ethics. "Hippocratic methods have formed the basis of all departments of modern advance."' His theory of the four humors is recognized by Taylor as having had a long persisting influence on later medicine. Taylor admits that the theory is baseless but says that the conception of functional coördination of the organs has never been discarded. He might perhaps have gone farther: there would seem to be a rather close correspondence between the old theory of the humors and recent ideas as to the ductless glands and their interrelations. Aristotle is praised for his contributions to zoology, especially for his classifications and for his amazingly accurate observations without such modern scientific tools as the microscope. Galen, the last of the great physicians, combines Hippocratic practice with Aristotelian theory and adds the results of his own brilliant work, especially |